As someone who has spent a lot of time investigating connections between the Quaker inward light and focusing, I am attuned to other ways that this way of knowing has found cultural expression. Guy Claxton has some remarks on focusing in his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (p. 172) that mentions some connections he has found:
[Focusing] is very akin to the Japanese concept of kufa which D. T. Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture describes as: Not just thinking with the head, but the state when the whole body is involved in and applied to the solving of a problem . . . It is the intellect that raises a question, but it is not the intellect that answers it . . . The Japanese often talk about ‘asking the abdomen’, or ‘thinking with the abdomen’, or ‘seeing or hearing with the abdomen’. The abdomen, which includes the whole system of viscera, symbolizes the totality of one’s personality . . . Psychologically speaking, [kufa] is to bring out what is stored in the unconscious, and let it work itself out quite independently of any kind of interfering consciousness . . . One may say, this is literally groping in the dark, there is nothing definite indicated, we are entirely lost in the maze. It may also have been Gendlin’s felt sense which was referred to as thymos by the classical Greeks. Located in the phrenes, again the central part of the body - lungs, diaphragm, abdomen - thymos is that part of a person which ‘advises him on his course of action, it puts words into his mouth . . .He can converse with it or with his “heart” or his “belly”, almost as man to man . . . For Homeric man the thymos tends not to be felt as part of the self: it commonly appears as an independent inner voice.’ [E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational] It appears that, in other cultures and other times, ‘thinking with the abdomen’ was a routine and familiar way of knowing.
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AuthorI am Andy Hoover. I was first exposed to what would later become focusing as a college freshman in 1972. I can't say that I understood then what it was about. About a decade later, when I came across the Focusing book, I was researching "right-brain" practices as the key to religious experience. Focusing was a perfect fit. I became a Quaker because I came across Quaker writings that sounded a lot like Focusing. Archives
May 2019
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